Mozambique

Brussels — Today, the HR/VP Federica Mogherini met the President of Mozambique, Mr Filipe Nyusi, during his official visit in the EU. The meeting continued the dialogue initiated in Maputo, during the HR/VP's visit in Mozambique in February, on the main areas of EU-Mozambique relations. The European Union and Mozambique have long-standing and broad partnership and there is commitment on both sides to deepen these further.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a brief statement issued on 23 April, welcomed the Mozambican government's acknowledgement "that an amount in excess of one billion US dollars of external debt guaranteed by the government had not previously been disclosed to the Fund". These undisclosed loans first came to light in an article in the "Wall Street Journal" on 3 April. The IMF reacted by suspending a mission due to visit Mozambique, and halting disbursement of the second instalment of a $283 million loan agreed last October from the Fund's Standby Credit Facility (SCF).

Plans to build a gas pipeline from the northern Mozambican district of Palma to the South African province of Gauteng took a step forward when a partnership agreement to build the pipeline was signed in Maputo on 22 April. The new agreement builds on a memorandum of understanding between the partners signed in February. The companies that signed the agreement were Profin Consulting (represented by its Chief Executive Officer, Olivia Machel); Mozambique's National Hydrocarbon Company, ENH (represented by Martinho Tavares, of its Board of Directors); the China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau, CPP, and the China Petroleum Technology Development Corporation (both represented by their deputy chairpersons, Chen Qingxun and Yun Wei), and the South African company Progas Investment (represented by Nhlanhla Magubane).

Mozambique is becoming a case study on the perils of rushing into markets at the edge of the world’s financial system. Global investors who in 2013 thought they were lending a state-owned company $850m to buy a tuna fishing fleet learned within months that the funds had been diverted to buy ships for the navy.